To add another two cents.......I hear stories from unnamed frame
builders who are asked to "restore" vintage bikes where said
restoration involves replacing all three tubes, lugs, paint, decals.
etc.. etc. And this, just to make the bike look like it fell off a
showroom floor. That's ok I guess. But it sounds to me a bit like the
show "extreme make over." Getting old is not acceptable so we lift and
tuck and cut and do anything we can to ourselves to conceal the
original, i.e, the one that, unfortunately, gets old and used up. Even
more, try to improve on the original by painting these bikes with
plastic and clear coat rather than the thin stuff that scratched as soon
as you got the bike. Anyway, makes little sense to me. Most of the
bikes we collect......especially these venerated Masis, were bought by
racers who beat the living daylights out of them (I know I did). They
weren't meant to be venerated, they were meant to be ridden. To rebuild
mine would involve the following: replace seat lug, bottom bracket, seat
tube and top tube, repaint, re-decal. I decided that it would become
Frankenstein's monster and hung it up on the basement wall to remind me
of my halcyon days. I would vote for saving them as close to what they
are NOW as possible. And speaking of Belgium (my favorite topic), in
the Rosselare museum they have the bike that Museeuw rode to a win in
Paris Roubaix. There it sits still absolutely covered the mud and dirt
he covered it with. They preserved it just as he rode it over the
finish line. I don't know, but that seems to say something to me about
extreme restorations. In fact, most of the bikes I have seen in the
Belgian museums are exhibited with all their dents and scratches in
tact. So it was ten cents.
Eddie Albert
Chappaqua, NY